Home Service Scheduling Software With Upfront Pricing

Almost every home service job is priced from a few facts about the property. A clean depends on bedrooms and condition. Window cleaning depends on the number of windows or the size of the house. Gutter clearing depends on the length of the run and how many storeys. You already know these rules, because you apply them on the phone every day. Upfront pricing means writing them down once so the customer can apply them without you.

Each service has a base price. Each question is a price variable, and each answer adjusts the price as a fixed amount, a plus or minus, or a percentage. A four-bedroom house that needs attention costs the base price times the size adjustment times the condition adjustment, and the customer watches that number change as they answer. A travel zone adds the charge for a long drive.

When they book, the same calculation runs again on the server, so the price they saw is the price they pay. For the few jobs that really do need a look first, offer a site visit as a bookable service and send a quote the customer can accept online afterwards.

Set your working hours and the customer sees only the slots inside them. Add each cleaner or crew as a team member with their own hours, and each job is assigned to one of them when it is booked. A slot that one customer has taken is not shown to the next, so there are no double bookings to untangle on a Monday morning.

Travel is handled by zones. A job in your core area carries no extra charge; a job on the edge of it adds the figure you set. Because the zone is part of the price, the long drive is paid for before you decide whether to take the job.

There is no automatic route planning. What there is instead is a page that only offers the times you can do, with the team you have, for the areas you cover. For most home service businesses that is the useful part, and it removes the back and forth of finding a time by phone.

Collecting money at the door is the worst part of a home visit. Card readers that lose signal, customers who have no cash, bank transfers that arrive next week or not at all. The fix is to move payment to the moment of booking. A deposit or the full price is charged by card through Stripe into your own account when the customer confirms, and the balance is charged when you mark the job complete or sent as an invoice.

A deposit also changes who turns up. A customer who has paid is at home when you arrive, and one who cancels late has still covered part of your lost slot. Put your cancellation terms on the booking page so they are agreed before the card is charged.

Online payments are part of the paid plans, and your account applies for payments once it is set up. The booking page, quotes and invoices work on the free plan, so your services, prices and hours can be live before the first card is charged.

The best home service customer is the one who books once and comes back every fortnight. Let them set the visit to repeat when they book, and the bookings appear in your diary for the weeks ahead. They change or pause it themselves without a phone call, and each visit is confirmed by email.

Recurring work is also what makes a team schedulable. When most of the diary is known in advance, the gaps are visible and new one-off jobs fill them. Team members see their own bookings, and the dashboard shows the whole week.

After each visit is marked complete, the customer is emailed a review request and can add photos of the finished work. Those reviews appear on your reviews page, on your free hosted website and anywhere you embed them, which is where the next recurring customer finds you.

Start from what the customer sees, because that is where the booking is won or lost. They should see a price without calling, a real list of open times, and a way to pay, all without creating an account. If any of those three is missing, they go to the next name in the search results.

Then look at what you need behind it: deposits into your own Stripe account, recurring visits, team members and locations, quotes for the jobs that need a look first, invoices, and reviews with photos that go out automatically. Check that it works on your existing website with one line of code, and that there is a free hosted website if you do not have one.

Finally, start on the free plan with no card. Set up two services and the questions that price them, put the booking link on your Google Business Profile, and see whether the first booking arrives without a phone call. That is a better test than any feature list.